RIGHT TO LAND IN BRAZIL Editora da UFF Nossos livros estão disponíveis em www.editora.uff.br Livraria Icaraí Rua Miguel de Frias, 9, anexo, sobreloja, Icaraí, Niterói, RJ, 24220-900, Brasil Tel.: +55 21 2629-5293 ou 2629-5294 [email protected] Dúvidas e sugestões Tel./fax.: +55 21 2629-5287 [email protected] RIGHT TO LAND IN BRAZIL The gestation of the conflict 1795-1824 2ND EDITION RECORD Copyright © 2014 by Márcia Maria Menendes Motta Direitos desta edição reservados à Editora da UFF - Editora da Universidade Federal Fluminense - Rua Miguel de Frias, 9 - anexo - sobreloja - Icaraí - CEP 24220-900 - Niterói, RJ - Brasil -Tel.: +5521 2629-5287 - Fax: +5521 2629-4 5288 - http://www.editora.uff.br- E-mail: [email protected] É proibida a reprodução total ou parcial desta obra sem autorização expressa da Editora. Tradução: David Willian Hardistys Capa, projeto gráfico e editoração eletrônica: D29/ Leandro Dittz Dados Internacionais de Catalogação-na-Publicação - CIP M917 Motta, Marcia Maria Menendes Right to land in Brazil: the gestation of the conflict 1795-1824 / Marcia Maria Menendes Motta, translation of David Willian Hardistys. – Editora da UFF, 2014. ISBN 978-85-228-1084-0 BISAC PHO015000 PHOTOGRAFHY / Photojournalism 1. Land tenure - Brazil. 2. Agrarian right – Brazil. I. Título. II. Hardistys, David Willian. CCD 333.3181 o, Rosa Malena. Corporeidade e cotidianidade na formação de professores / Rosa Malena Carvalho – Niterói: Edit UNIVERSIDADE FEDERAL FLUMINENSE Reitor: Roberto de Souza Salles Vice-Reitor: Sidney Luiz de Matos Mello Pró-Reitor de Pesquisa e Pós-Graduação e Inovação: Antonio Claudio Lucas da Nóbrega Diretor da Editora da UFF: Mauro Romero Leal Passos Divisão de Editoração e Produção: Ricardo Borges Divisão de Distribuição: Luciene Pereira de Moraes Assessoria de Comunicação e Eventos: Ana Paula Campos Comissão Editorial Presidente: Mauro Romero Leal Passos Ana Maria Martensen Roland Kaleff Eurídice Figueiredo Gizlene Neder Heraldo Silva da Costa Mattos Humberto Fernandes Machado Juarez Duayer Luiz Sérgio de Oliveira Marco Antonio Sloboda Cortez Maria Lais Pereira da Silva Renato de Souza Bravo Rita Leal Paixão Simoni Lahud Guedes Tania de Vasconcellos Right to land in Brazil | 5 For Duda, who taught me to be a “girl”. Finally, I thank David Willian Hardistys impeccable translation and my colleague Rui Santos thoughtful reading during the English translation process 6 | Márcia Maria Menendes Motta Right to land in Brazil | 7 CONTENTS Preface 9 Abbreviations 13 Introduction 15 PART 1 25 Memoirists and jurists: Agriculture and land rights in Portugal The sesmarias: origin and consolidation of a custom 27 Law in dispute: Possession and property in the late eighteenth century 55 PART 2 79 Sesmarias and power in the Mariano period The alvará of 1795: emblematic example of the Mariano period 81 The governor Francisco Mauricio de Sousa Coutinho 103 and the system of sesmarias PART 3 127 Sesmarias: empire and conflict The law of sesmarias and colonial occupation: concerning the laws 129 Concessions during the Mariano period: regional mapping and indicators 153 The Crown intervenes: the emblematic concessions 177 8 | Márcia Maria Menendes Motta PART 4 199 Sesmarias and the path of Brazil’s Independence Law and the vision concerning sesmarias in the eighteen twenties 201 The granting of sesmarias in the territorialisation of the Crown (1808/1824) 231 Final Considerations 261 Bibliography 269 Sources 281 Right to land in Brazil | 9 PREFACE Hardly a day passes without a Brazilian news agency reporting problems involving the use of land between us: it is the red Aprils, the red Mays, in an ambiguous invocation that refers to blood and socialism, showing the viscerally conservative character of our media and, as a rule, leaving in the background the X of the matter. And in this vast country, cut by rivers that until recently were undeniably mighty, without any records, also until recently, with climatic disasters actually deserving their names - earthquakes, typhoons, tsunamis and all the retinue of other scourges that do not spare other parts of the planet. Tiradentes thought, according to the Autos da Devassa da Inconfidência Mineira, that the country flourished and could be great in every way, if it were not for the Portuguese carrying all that wealth to the other side of the Atlantic, sucking out what was produced here, like perverse sponges. In the painful process of the emergence of a nation where before there had been political subjection, economic dependence, captive labour and immeasurable expanses of land, Brazilians have become accustomed to blaming the Portuguese. What Tiradentes and others like him did is understandable: they played their part in their time, which was revolutionary and, soon after, there were nationalisms everywhere, with the crumbling old structures, as Alexis de Tocqueville had seen; Portuguese possessions in America earning a figure impossible to equate with the rickety shadow of their old European Dad, a long time bogged down in an apparent cul-de- sac. That this would continue relentlessly, driving the same argument – and with less than fifteen years from celebrating two centuries of independence – this, however, deserves greater reflection.T he delay? Portugal’s fault, the edge of Europe always about to plummet into the abyss. Slavery? Portugal’s fault, which reinvented and worsened it during the time of the discoveries. If Antarctic France had remained in Guanabara Bay, during the Villegagnon period; had the United Provinces of the Netherlands - as the Netherlands today was then called – placed its foot in Pernambuco even after the departure of Mauríce of Nassau, or had, who knows, Britain in retaliation occupied the Brazilian coast if Dom João had not changed Lisbon for Rio, everything would certainly have been different. 10 | Márcia Maria Menendes Motta As nothing like this happened, and it is no more than material for novels or lucubration against reality, the historical evidence should be examined in order to make some progress in the understanding of our misfortune. To do so, Right to land in Brazil: the Gestation of the Conflict, by Márcia Maria Menendes Motta, provides the best ammunition. In her doctoral thesis, published in 1998, the author had already given scholarly attention to the land problem in Brazil. Issues relating to the social and political conflicts associated with the possession and ownership of land were dealt with on the frontiers of power in the former province of Rio de Janeiro, more specifically in Paraíba do Sul, and this was a work by a meticulous researcher who did not shy away from the thorny debates within the subject matter. There, her time period was the nineteenth century, when the empire skated across the land and labour problem, located among liberal and conservative precepts - which, as we know, have not always followed the original European ideology, by changing the order of factors and, in defiance of arithmetic, shuffling items around.T his was a more precise and vertically oriented approach. Nine years later, obstinate, like every historian worthy of the name, once more breaking in to the past to better understand - and support - the present, Márcia Motta brings to the public research into the genealogy, or the possible genealogies, of the terrible problem of land that plagues the country. The period covered is long, five centuries, but intersected by very specific conjunctures, which act as incisions on the same fabric and which leave marks: from the time of King Fernando, in 1375, to the time of the deputies of the Portuguese Cortes and independence, between 1820 and 1824, the sesmarias law and the regulation of land were perpetuated despite rereadings, additions, alterations and reinterpretations. Through extracts, the author introduces us to the agents of these cleavages, men who suggested changes in the law - such as Domingos Vandelli, Mello Freire, Francisco Mauricio de Sousa Coutinho, and José Bonifácio de Andrade e Silva - and the men who manipulated it, accumulating possession and properties followed by their battles to legalise it, such as Inácio Correia Pamplona and Garcia Paes Leme. The heart of the problem lies in the wide range of conceptions and definitions that, over the centuries, have sought to explain the phenomenon of the sesmarias. Strictly speaking the sesmarias were initially conceived of as portions of land donated by the Crown in order to boost agriculture in a Portugal, and throughout the West, lashed by the crisis of the fourteenth century. They had to be cultivated, otherwise the relevant authorities could redistribute them to those who used them properly. The kingdom was small, Right to land in Brazil | 11 the land well known and trodden, the geographical boundaries well defined: in the American conquest, everything was immense and unknown with fluid or open boundaries, so everything changed. Soon the sesmarias, or rather the possession of them, were concentrated in a few hands, distorting the old sense of the law. However, to complicate things, and because the size of the land granted varied over time and, above all, was geographically varied, there was smallholders who, in the same way, possessed sesmarias, facing up to the larger owners, but also, like them, chasing recognition of their possessions, by sending papers accumulated by generations of farmers to the Overseas Council in Lisbon. The sesmarias, therefore had a distinct meaning on one side of the Atlantic compared to the other, in the kingdom and the conquered land, in the metropolis and the American colony. In Portugal they imported much less than in Brazil, where, after being one of the vectors in the colonisation process, this is what remained in the genesis of the phenomenon of land injustice. Even so, independence ended up worsening the picture, with liberal ideals enshrining absolute private property and sweeping away the requirement to cultivate which, moreover, hardly applied in the Luso-American lands: its logic was another, referring to the communal traditions of the Middle Ages.